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I realize you disagree with my take, but if you want to understand it at least, I would suggest trying to steelman my position. The examples you bring up are probably the absolute worst cases for VR and if you judge a technology by its worst cases then nobody would use a technology. Judge an argument by its strongest interpretation, not its weakest. > People love real spaces, real objects, real venues, smells, and atmosphere. The physical characteristics of friends and strangers, from subtle facial cues to outrageous clowning around. In VR, all that is stifled or non-existent; substituted with digitally representation, crafted by unknown processes. Cold origins. Black boxes. This same argument could have been used to argue against the Internet, against using the Web to replace real services (how can you replace the minutiae of human voice interaction with a screen??), against the mobile revolution even. Yet mobile phones are here to stay and even developing countries with bad public infrastructure rely heavily on mobile phones to stay connected. Overly broad philosophical arguments never have explanatory power. I think you can make the argument that the experience of VR would make it too cumbersome to use no matter the streamlining, but to attribute some mystical quality to physical connections neglects the sheer growth of the internet, web, and mobile that are extant. > See you at Burning Man! From your couch. In this impossible "RR" (remote reality?) future, a typical music festival or live event would have both real people and a bunch of VR drones - somehow inter-mingling, silent without collision, without any issues. Until then, VR is a device strapped to your head, dishing out pre-renders. Your real cat limits the VR experience, and into the bottom drawer goes your headset, right next to the DJI drone you got for Xmas. It's not like mobile phones took over every aspect of our society. My relatives that kept in touch with their young school friends throughout their lives over mobile phones also as adults meet up with their friends IRL. Friends that met partners while playing WoW live with their partners and have started families with them. This isn't an all-or-nothing proposition and suggesting so seems absurd given the prior art we have of digital technologies. If VR becomes a default way to communicate and collaborate, that's all it will take to "win". |
No because we didn't have anything else before the internet other than landline phones, one per household.
In my comment where I said "we already have it", that's the key point. VR is not an incredible shift like mobiles and internet were, and yet your last line flirts with the word "default". Of course it will be popular and clever, and will do well for the special times we want VR by placing a thing on our heads. But like drone cameras, VR will not elbow out the default cameras we already have that work better in most cases.
> but to attribute some mystical quality to physical connections neglects the sheer growth of the internet
Some mystical quality? You say that like "meh, real life"! The internet isn't trying to be "reality", it's just the internet. VR literally has the word reality in its name. Obviously comparisons will be made to actual reality for technologies that use the same word in the name.